on Three Seas, viz. through the Caucasus, Iran and especially India, written
after his trip (1466–1472) (Nikitin 1948) but only rediscovered in the
nineteenth century as an important predecessor of Indian and Iranian studies
(Barthold 1947). Jan Amos Komensk ̆ (Johannes Amos Commenius)
(1592–1670), the ‘incomparable Moravian’, wrote a Dictionary of Tongues
and All Scienceswhich circulated throughout Eastern Europe and was
translated into Russian and even Arabic. The Polish Jesuit Michael Boym
(1612–1659) compiled the first dictionary of the Chinese language (published
in 1667, with an edition of 1670, cf. Szczésniak 1947; Honey 2001: 7–8).
Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), Voivode(prince) of Moldavia, wrote Kniga
sistema, a celebrated account of mainly Ottoman but also Persian Islam. It
‘circulated in manuscripts and in editions printed in 10 languages, and was
quoted in Paris, Berlin, and London; in St Petersburg and Bucharest; and from
Mount Athos to Istanbul and Alep in the Near East. Great spirits in European
letters—Voltaire in his Histoire de Charles XII, Byron in Don Juan, and Victor
Hugo—praised him’ (Cândea 1999). His most gifted son, Antiokh Cantemir
(1708–1744), a friend of Montesquieu and Voltaire, is considered among the
first philosophers of the Russian Enlightenment.
In Russia, the German-born Theophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738)
displayed a keen interest in early eighteenth-century Eastern European work
on Asian religions, from Dimitrie Cantemir’s writings on Ottoman and Persian
Islam to the Czech Jesuit Carolus Slavíãek’s findings on Chinese and Indian
religions (Lozovan 1974; Kolmás 1994; Ciurtin 2003). Bayer himself was
Professor of Oriental Antiquities at the Russian Imperial Academy, a position
created specially for him. His Museum Sinicum (1730) included basic
knowledge on Chinese religions combined with materials brought directly
through embassies and missionaries from China (Lundbaek 1986: 39–140;
Honey 2001: 7–8). Somewhat later, Nikolai I. Novikov (1744–1818), a man
of letters and a Rosicrucian, produced the first Russian translation of the
Bhagavad-G¥tÇ, based on the Wilkins English translation of 1785. Plans for
establishing an Asiatic Academy in Saint Petersburg were drafted as early as
1810 by Count Sergei S. Uvarov (1786–1855) (Uvarov 1810/1811). A similar
project was proposed for the University of Vilnius, which at the beginning of
the nineteenth century was a good centre of erudite learning on extra-European
religious worlds. Unfortunately, it met with no success. Elsewhere the Bohemian
Jesuit Josef Dobrovsk ̆(1753–1829) ‘compared Sanskrit and Avestan with Old
Church Slavonic as early as 1806’ (Tremblay and Rastegar 2005). The first
encyclopedic lexicon of the Transylvanian Romanians, Lesicon de conversatie
storicesc-religionariu[Religio-Historical Conversation Lexicon], was published
at Buda by Alexandru Gavra in 1847.
In general, the study of religions in Eastern Europe has followed a trajectory
seen in many other regions, too. It began within a religious, mainly Christian
framework, but it slowly moved in a different direction and acquired54
EUGEN CIURTIN